What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Hot stuff,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Valentine’s Day was just a few days ago and we’ve had a long cold snap here in Saskatchewan—two good reasons to send you something warming.

Anaïs Nin—such a lovely name—lived between 1903 and 1977 and she was the author of a number of novels that remain unknown to me: Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love and Solar Barque form a five-volume roman-fleuve entitled Cities of the Interior (1959). She also published the novels House of Incest (1936), The Seduction of the Minotaur (1961) and Collages (1964), and a collection of short stories, Under a Glass Bell. The only pleasure these have given me has been to wonder what they are about. What story would a novel called Solar Barque tell? What was the Albatross and who were her Children?

Nin is better known for her published diaries, which covered every decade of her life except the first (and she missed that one only by a year, since she started her diary when she was eleven years old). She was born in France, lived in the United States for many years, she was beautiful and cosmopolitan, and she came to know many interesting and famous people, the writer Henry Miller among them, all of whom she discussed and dissected in her diary. Her diary’s importance lies in the fact that female voices have often been silenced or ignored—still are—and an extended female monologue covering the first half of the twentieth century is rare.

And Anaïs Nin also wrote erotica. Hot stuff. Kinky stuff. Pages full of women who are wet not because it’s raining and men who are hard not because they’re cruel. Artists and Models, which contains two stories from her collections of erotic writings Delta of Venus and Little Birds, is the latest book I’m sending you. It may leave you cold, Mr. Harper, reading about Mafouka the hermaphrodite painter from Montparnasse and her lesbian roommates or about the sexual awakening of a painter’s model in New York, but it bears noting that while covering our loins and our hearts with clothes is often useful—it’s minus 23 degrees Celsius outside as I write these words—there is the risk that they are also hiding, perhaps burying, an essential part of us, one that does not think but rather feels. Clothes are the commonest trappings of vanity. When we are naked, we are honest. That is the essential quality of these lustful stories of Nin, embellished or wholly invented though they may be: their honesty. They say: this is part of who we are—deny it, and you are denying yourself.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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